recent stability problems with fxp driver

[John Polstra]

On 12-Sep-2003 Mike Tancsa wrote:
> At 05:01 PM 12/09/2003, John Polstra wrote:
> 
>>When I first installed FreeBSD on this system, it disabled dynamic
>>standby mode as you showed above.  Maybe it shouldn't have ... :-)
> 
> Is it possible Dell re-enables it somehow in the BIOS ? Perhaps your 
> version of the NIC needs it disabled a different way ?

Could be ... I don't know.  The driver checks whether dynamic standby
mode is enabled in the EEPROM at attach time, and if it is enabled
the driver emits that message and turns it off again.  I only saw the
message the first time I booted FreeBSD.  So if the BIOS is overriding
the setting, it's not doing so by scribbling in the EEPROM.

> Also I found I needed to physically power off some of the machines
> for the change to take effect and also the problem was MUCH more
> acute at 10baseT than 100BaseTX.  I think jlemon said it was in both
> modes, but I only ever saw the problem at 10baseT and like you saw,
> it didnt take much to force the issue.

I've definitely got a 100 Mbps full-duplex link.  I haven't tried it
at 10 Mbps, and I wouldn't bother using them at that speed even if
they worked perfectly.

John